Paddy killed and ate an anole yesterday. It was quick enough that I could go "ah well; Nature red in tooth and claw and all that," but slow enough that I could feel guilty about not dispatching the lizard myself.

Since the weather has gotten a bit warmer, I've noticed an odd smell in my room. It's almost a urine smell, but the pets don't come in here, and I swear it wasn't me! Since the ceiling leaked and ruined my old mattress a couple years ago, the air has been rather damp. I've been burning candles, and I haven't left any food in here. I went looking for the source, and I just found what I believe to be black mold in the back of my closet and on the window sills. It would explain the sudden asthma flare-up, among other things. I'm really hoping this isn't what I think it is, because I know it can't just be in my room! I've also noticed the smell in the basement.

Central Florida had a pretty strong line of storms blow through Sunday. Monday morning class, I walk in, lights are dimmed because of the presentation, and sit through class. At the end, the lights go up, and people started to realize everything that had touched the floor was wet. The carpet at the bottom of the auditorium-style classroom was standing water 1" deep. I called facilities, and they got it dry.

However, on Wednesday, that room stank so bad from the damp and mildew.

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ďAll that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost."-J.R.R Tolkien

First time in this thread but I've read everything and Vorbau can add me to the fan club!

I keep a small garden in the front of my house with a few holly bushes, some phlox, and what I call grass plants that resemble overgrown clumps of grass. They're very common in my area and make a decent border plant on the edge of the garden.

Last week I was weeding, watering, etc. when I noticed what I thought was an oddly-shaped piece of mulch nestled in among the grass plants. Nope - it was a cat turd (is 'turd' an approved eHell word? ).

I was grossed out to have cat feces in my bare hands ( ) and flung it out into the front yard in surprise. Later, when I was pulling weeds out of the lawn and hunting down the cat poo, I couldn't find it. Anywhere! I eventually gave up and went back in for the night.

Come last week I'm mowing the front yard and look down in surprise to see a white-hair-encrusted cat turd! It was so disgusting and so hysterical just sitting there in the middle of the yard. I have a cat myself but she's a pretty-pretty princess and will go indoors to use the litterbox instead of going outside. So it might have been hers but I'm blaming the neighborhood strays for the case of "Airborn Cat Biscuits".

Word of advice. If you're having pizza for dinner loaded with fresh tomatoes, peppers, onions and mushrooms, don't have granola for an evening snack, your co-workers will not appreciate the resulting aroma the following day.

Word of advice. If you're having pizza for dinner loaded with fresh tomatoes, peppers, onions and mushrooms, don't have granola for an evening snack, your co-workers will not appreciate the resulting aroma the following day.

Word of advice. If you're having pizza for dinner loaded with fresh tomatoes, peppers, onions and mushrooms, don't have granola for an evening snack, your co-workers will not appreciate the resulting aroma the following day.

bwahahahahaha! You are evil!

I just didn't think about it until I felt that ominous rumble in the gut that resulted in a mad dash to the bathroom.

There are some things about your parents that you just DON'T want to know.

Heard that! My Pappaw, may he rest in peace, sometimes felt the need to tell me about him and Grandma....erm....playing scrabble in their younger days. O.O That's exactly the look I'd give him - eyes as big as 50-cent-pieces and all, then I would laugh and say, "Pappaw, I love you, but I really don't need to hear this." Sometimes he'd stop - but sometimes he'd keep going, LOL. He was in his 70s though, slowly losing his mind, quite the joker, and also very blunt (even before dementia started setting in), so I just chalked it up to that, LOL.

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"Some of the most wonderful people are the ones who don't fit into boxes." -Tori Amos

I can't believe it's taken me so long to find this thread... and I haven't finished reading yet, but I still have to contribute. So here, for your grossout viewing, I present three doggy tales and a non-dog one.

The Great Second-Hand Tuna Debacle of Spring 2009

I adopted Molly, my adorable little maltese - shih tzu cross when she was just over 6 weeks old. She was a tiny ball of fluff with button nose and teeth. When she'd been with me two days she found the cat food, and scarfed the lot - tinned tuna.

All was well until I woke up at 1am, feeling rather - err - damp. Molly had vomited tuna all over - over her, over me (it was in my hair!) and all over the bed. Every bit of bed linen including the doona and pillows were covered in second-hand tuna barf. It was gross. So there I am, with a heaving puppy, freezing cold and stripping the bed. No spare doona (luckily the Houseboy [housemate at the time] had a spare I found out later). She got bathed, I got showered and fully dressed, and sat up with this poor pathetic little doggy who was still dry-heaving four hours later.

After that the cats got fed on top of the dishwasher which was in the laundry, and Molly no longer got to share my bed. Oddly enough she still loves tuna.

There's Klingons on the starboard bow

When Molly and Suzi were tiny pups, occasionally when they pooped it got stuck on their fluffy little backsides. Standard operating procedure was a quick trip to the laundry tub, dunk their bums under a stream of warm water to rinse out as much as possible, then dog shampoo, rinse and dry. Nothing quite like picking up a cute puppy with a poo bum.

Anyway one day I came home from work, got greeted by the dogs as usual, and noticed poop smell. Suzi was nearest and youngest, so I grabbed her, straight into the laundry where she got her bum washed. Oddly enough though there seemed to be no poo. While I was wondering why, I could still smell it. Then I looked down.

Yup, it wasn't Suzi - or Molly either. I'd stepped in a ginormous Douglas turd (the giant German Shepherd next door who comes to visit), blamed Suzi needlessly and tracked Dougie Poo all through the house. And it was all over my good boots.

Tell me about the rabbit....

The cats are loving the rural life, and this summer we've had a plague of rabbits. The cats have decided they're fair game, so we've had to dispose of a few bunny bodies in the past few months, usually after the dogs managed to get their greedy little paws on them.

One day we'd been out all day, and the dogs had been locked in the house. Well, one of the cats had brought a bunny in, and one of the dogs (or both) had dismembered it all over my bedroom floor. Head here, leg there, intestines - you get the idea. Disgusting.

Biker Barbecue

A couple of years ago I was riding my bike in to work, and I may have been following the car ahead just a tad too closely. I realised this when he went over some roadkill and I didn't have room to swerve around it. D'oh! So I hit it head on - a very dead wallaby which was mostly smeared across the road, but with a sufficiently large chunk left for me to hit.

As I hit it, a goodly chunk of said wallaby hit my header pipes, which get really hot. The chunk contained wallaby and wallaby's internal contents.

As I rode in to work, the bits of roadkill cooked on the header pipes, and the smell wafted upwards, straight into my helmet. Roo and poo barbecue for the next 20+ kilometers. Yes, I was dry heaving in my helmet for the rest of the trip. Fortunately I was riding long enough to burn all of it away, as there was no stinky left-overs that afternoon on the way home.

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Out on the patio we'd sit,And the humidity we'd breathe,We'd watch the lightning crack over canefieldsLaugh and think, this is Australia.

So there I was, grilling some steaks on a nice warm summer Sunday. We didn't finish the last rare steak, so the leftovers sat on the worktop in the kitchen for a while. When I came back in I saw some flies on it, shooed them off and realized that they'd laid eggs on the meat. What I did next probably should have earned this post a place in the 'yeah, you might not have wanted to do that' thread, but on balance I thought I should protect those with a weak stomach.

Basically I shrugged and tossed the steak in the bin. After all, rubbish day was next Thursday, what could possibly happen?

Uh-huh.

So Wednesday night I was sat in the living room reading alone, DH and my children were already asleep, and I thought I heard this weird kind of hissy noise. Very quiet, but definitely there. So I went to investigate, and yeah. The kitchen floor was a seething mass of maggots. My bin was of those tall, free-standing stainless steel jobbies with an automatic lid and (as I now know) a small gap between rim and lid. Just big enough for an enterprising maggot to fit through so they can throw themselves off into the unknown like a miniature paratrooper re-enacting the Normandy landings. They were everywhere. Halfway up the hall to the living room, scaling the stairs (I did NOT realize that those beasties can climb), covering the kitchen floor, still flinging themselves into the blue yonder from the bin... And they were so earnest and intent, they almost looked like they were pulling themselves along by their teeth (which they probably don't have, but you know what I mean), going "hngh, hngh, hngh" with the effort.

I quickly ran upstairs to warn my husband that there might be some noise (and cursing) downstairs and tackled the clear-up. I can tell you now, a Dyson vacuum cleaner is well up to the job. The clear plastic container that the dust ends up in might be a bit of a downside, but on the other hand it's quite easy to carry the whole bally lot of them down to the bottom end of the garden and tip them out there for the local blackbird population to snack on.

There's a bit of a coda to this. Months later I was having a cup of tea when I suddenly felt a lump of something hit my mouth. I thought, hang on, this is tea, not soup, and checked my cup. There were maggots in there, floating merrily in the finest Sainsbury's red label.

Or so I thought for one brief, mildly disgusted moment (I'm not very squeamish). Then I had a closer look, and although the size, colour and shape were close, it wasn't maggots. Turns out that when last I'd made rice I was in a bit of a rush. I'd measured the rice with my plastic measuring cups and then measured the water with the same cup and poured it in the electric kettle to start the rice off on the cooker with boiling water from said kettle. Some rice grains must have clung to the plastic and then ended up in there.